Intense shelling in eastern Ukraine hit civilian areas on Thursday night as an escalating battle between government forces and Russian-backed separatists entered its sixth day.
Several civilian apartment blocks in the Ukrainian-controlled town of Avdiivka suffered direct hits during what was described as the heaviest night of shelling since renewed fighting broke out nearly a week ago.
Russian-backed separatist authorities said intense shelling had also hit civilian areas of separatist-held city Donetsk.
Ukraine said on Friday morning that four soldiers had been killed in the previous 24 hours. Both sides have reported civilian casualties.
A neighborhood with buildings damaged in shelling in the Russian-backed separatist controlled city of Donetsk, Ukraine.
At least 20 people, including soldiers from both sides and civilians, have been reported dead since fighting erupted near a contested area north of Donetsk on Sunday.
The escalating battle has seen both sides using multiple rocket launchers and heavy artillery that they promised to pull back from the front line under the 2015 Minsk peace agreement.
Reporters with the Associated Press heard Grad missiles being fired from both sides of the lines on Thursday.
The renewed violence has left thousands of civilians without electricity, gas, and in some cases water and central heating, as fighting knocks out key infrastructure that supplies towns on both sides of the front lines.
Pavel Zhebrivsky, the governor of the government-controlled part of Donetsk region, said on Friday that a ceasefire had been arranged via a joint Russian-Ukrainian ceasefire monitoring centre so repairs could be made to damaged power lines.
The arrangement would see both sides of the conflict send repair crews to fix the damage, he said.
The war in eastern Ukraine has been locked in an uneasy deadlock since Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, negotiated a ceasefire deal in February 2015.
The latest fighting is some of the most serious since that agreement was signed, raising the risks of a return to the all-out warfare that tore up the region two years ago.
Russia and Ukraine traded blame for the escalation in violence at a session of the United Nations Security Council on Thursday night.
Ukraine's UN ambassador, Volodymr Yelchenko, who holds the presidency of the Security Council for February, said the strife around Avdiivka started with artillery shelling by the Russian army and Russian-backed fighters from the two suburbs they control near the town.
Nikki Haley, the new US ambassador to the United Nations, condemned Russia's "aggressive actions" in eastern Ukraine on Thursday and warned Moscow that US sanctions imposed after its annexation of Crimea will remain until the peninsula is returned to Ukraine.
Russia, which covertly deployed troops to the conflict two years ago, on Friday accused Ukraine of “breaking the Geneva convention” and using weapons banned under the Minsk agreement.
Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry, said in Moscow that what she called Kiev's "barbarism" had no justification and that Ukrainian armed forces had heavily shelled areas where women and children lived overnight.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday accused Ukraine of starting the escalation to rally support from the new US administration and other Western powers.
